L.A. County to consider temporary 3% cap on rent hikes for apartments

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Rent control supporters rally in April outside L.A. Countys Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration. The Board of Supervisors is expected to consider a temporary cap on rent hikes by late July. (Photo by Jeff Collins, the Orange County Register/SCNG)

Los Angeles County supervisors plan to vote by the end of July on a motion imposing rent control on older apartments in unincorporated areas for six months.

Board of Supervisors Chair Sheila Kuehl and Supervisor Hilda Solis introduced a motion in late June ordering county staff to draft an interim ordinance by mid-September capping rent hikes at 3 percent a year, with “base rents” frozen at July levels.

The stop-gap measure is designed to maintain housing affordability while the board reviews recommendations from a citizens working group that’s been studying tenant protections since the start of the year.

“While the working group studies these issues, rents continue to spiral upward,” the motion states. “The board (must) take action to protect tenants from unreasonable rent increases before the board has had the opportunity to deliberate on … permanent tenant protection policies.”

Those policies include permanent rent control and “just cause evictions,” which prohibit landlords from displacing tenants in good standing in most circumstances.

The proposed action is similar to other temporary rent freezes adopted in Northern California cities while rent control referendums were pending.

But David Kissinger, government affairs director for the South Bay Association of Realtors, said it’s premature for the county to act before getting the tenants working group recommendations.

“Where’s the urgency? There’s no urgency here,” said Kissinger, who has been monitoring the tenants working group as part of the Los Angeles Coalition for Responsible Housing Solutions, which opposes rent control. “Are we really in such a hurry? And will this really be effective? It’s a small number of units. … Will this make a dent? No, it will not make a dent.”

Allison Henry is working with Pasadena Tenants Union, speaks and collects signatures to bring awareness to residents about Rent Control. (Photo by Chris Rusanowsky)

In addition to a statewide ballot initiative to end restrictions limiting rent control to older apartments, rent control petition drives have been underway in nine California cities this year — including seven in Southern California. Signature gathering fell short in three of those cities, however: Long Beach, Pasadena and Inglewood. (A spokesman for the Inglewood petition drive said his group is appealing.)

The L.A. County rent-cap first appeared on the Tuesday, July 3, agenda. But county officials said they expected the measure to be postponed until July 31.

If approved, the rent cap would expire in six months but can be extended “as necessary.”

While state law limits rent control to apartments built before 1995, the county provisions could be extended to houses, condos and newer apartments if voters pass the statewide ballot initiative in November lifting those restrictions, currently listed as Proposition 10 on the Secretary of State’s website.

The L.A. County motion initially set the “base rent” on which increases would be calculated at July 3 levels, although the exact date is expected to shift to the end of July.

According to the county Chief Executive Office, the most populous portions of unincorporated L.A. County have 93,000 rental units or about 6 percent of all the multi-family housing in the county as a whole. It’s unclear how many of those units are eligible for rent control under current state law.

Still, that exceeds the number of multi-family units in Santa Monica, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills combined, all of which have rent control.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the date to vote on the motion has been postponed to July 31.

For more than a decade, Jeff Collins has followed housing and real estate, covering market booms and busts and all aspects of the real estate industry. He has been tracking rents and home prices, and has explored solutions to critical problems such as Southern California’s housing shortage and affordability crisis. Before joining the Orange County Register in 1990, he covered a wide range of topics for daily newspapers in Kansas, El Paso and Dallas. A Southern California native, he studied at UC Santa Barbara and UC Irvine. He later earned a master’s degree from the USC School of Journalism.